This past weekend in Chicago, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) announced the Nebula award winners for the best sci-fi and fantasy of 2014. Rather than a small panel of judges, the Nebula award winners are chosen by all SFWA active members, who consist of professional fantasy or sci-fi authors. As the SFWA is an American professional organization, the award only goes to American books published in the previous year.

Nebula Award for Best Novel of 2014

If J.J. Abrams and Margaret Atwood collaborated on a novel, it might look something like Annihilation, the first in an extraordinary trilogy. Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. This is the twelfth expedition. Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to…

Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2014

Aliens have landed in New York. After several months of no explanations, they finally reveal the reason for their arrival. The news is not good.

Geneticist Marianne Jenner is having a career breakthrough, yet her family is tearing itself apart. Her children Elizabeth and Ryan constantly bicker, agreeing only that an alien conspiracy is in play. Her youngest, Noah, is addicted to a drug that keeps temporarily changing his identity. The Jenner family could not be further apart. But between the four of them, the course of human history will be forever altered. Earth’s most elite scientists have ten months to prevent a disaster—and not everyone is willing to wait.

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

Emily Bird is an African American high school senior in Washington D.C., member of a privileged medical family, on the verge of college and the edge of the drug culture, and not really sure which way she will go—then one day she wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened.

Our theme this month is exploration, and fantasy and science fiction are the genres that push exploration the farthest. Science fiction books can keenly analyze an aspect of sociology or technology by building a whole future around a certain idea. Whereas fantasy pushes the imagination into new and wonderful places. Why explore earth when you can go down the rabbit hole to a whole new world? Check out these stories that will take you to galaxies long, long ago and far, far away.